Question first. You mention the phrase "continuous protection". Do you mean snapshots, or, do you mean something else like the various continous protection products out there which track changes at the block level to create, for all intensive purposes, continous snapshots.

For tracking changes, not necessarily in blocks level, can be done with Storage Foundation or do I have continuous snapshots with SF for Oracle RAC and replicate with Veritas Replicator replicate (VR) ?

Continuous Data Protection ( CDP ) is a methodology que continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data , enabling recovery points from any point in the past . CDP systems may be block- , file- , or application- based and can Provide fine granularities of restorable objects to infinitely variable recovery points . So , According to this definition , all CDP solutions Incorporate these three key attributes:

1. Date changes are continuously captured or tracked

2 . All data changes are stored in a separate location from the primary storage

3 . Recovery point objectives are arbitrary and need not be defined in advance of the current recovery

Per your definition, neither SF nor VR meet those requirements. SF and VVR can provide for snapshots and replication copies that are gauruanteed to be crash consistant. One can use space-optimized snapshots using Storage Foudation to create point-in-time copies. I have seen customers snapshot several times an hour and save a few days worth of snapshot and only needing a small amount of extra storage to accomindate the snapshots. The extra storage needed depends on the data change rate.

At this time, Symantec does not provide any product that meets the CDP definition.

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That being said, please take the following into account. These are just my opionions when dealing with such products before I came to Symantec:

If you do implemet any 3rd party CDP solution, one must do so very carefully. All Oracle data files along with redo and archieve logs must be protected together as a group to maintain database consistancy. It is very easy to corrupt a database using CDP tools. The other consideration is all other data feeds (the rest of the application Oracle is supporting)that the database is supporting. How will you keep those synchonized? This is usually done with some type of transaction broker, but is not as easy as you would think to implement correctly. In general, CDP solutions also consumes quite a bit of storage. Normmaly twice plus change rate.

Another way to solve the problem is to use log shipping, and delay the applicaiton of the logs to the standby dadtabase by some delta.